Log Buffer #79: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Dear guest, this is the 79^th edition of Log Buffer a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs, the weekly review of database blogs. Thanks to Dave Edwards of Pythian for helping me during the week especially for non-Oracle blogs. Log Buffer is published every Friday afternoon and if you want to contribute please get in touch with Dave. This is the the Log Buffer Guidelines for the Log Buffer editors. You may also consider subscribing to the Log Buffer Feed.

Since I did Log Buffer #56 and this is my second time, I tried harder and I hope you like this Log Buffer #79. First of all, I want to announce below two new categories I added to my Log Buffer, if others may like these can also be a part of the tradition I guess :)

Oracle blogs hot topics of the week

It all started for me when I saw Justin Kestelyn‘s post with subject Blog Tagged Again. Then immediately all Oracle bloggers started to tag each other(including me:) and Howard Roger‘s critique(may not be reached at the moment since Howard shutdown immediate his site to protest blog tagging) came after. Tim Hall had different thoughts and when all bloggers were so close to a divide into two one hero, Richard Foote, came with a different approach to tagging and in my opinion he saved the idea. If you are already tagged, you may take a side as you wish, but it would be great to follow every blogger tagged by a subject like Greg Rahn or Jonathan Lewis‘s giving their 8 things on Oracle 11g Optimizer New Features :) Also with this chance I want to support some part of Howard’s critique and give a hint on efficient RSS feed following;

– WordPress blog owners please set – Options > Reading > Syndication Feeds from “Full text” to “Summary”

– Blogger blog owners please set – Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds from “Full” to “Short”

OTN forums and Oracle-L list hot discussions of the week

And here is my second new category, the first subject is “star transformation tuning and db file sequential read wait” and in this discussion you will find how lots of more i/o may mean less response time and lots of valuable hints on bitmap indexes. Also Jonathan Lewis was requested for help during the discussion and he answered :) Second subject I picked from OTN forums this week is Strange ORDER BY results which includes nice order by (case when .. tricks.

And my favorite Oracle discussion list, Oracle-L, like always it was again very busy this week, and this is the thread I choosed; “Oracle recommends rebuilding IOTs in AQ to reduce redo” which have replies from Jonathan Lewis and Greg Rahn arguing on excess redo produced and the coalesce option over rebuilding for AQs.

And at last comes the traditional part of the Log Buffer with this week’s blog highlights starts, I had really hard time to choose because of the unusual blogging traffic of this week, please sorry me if I missed some but feel free to comment and add yours :)

Oracle

Richard Foote, after an OTN forum thread, warns for the DBMS_STATS METHOD_OPT default behavior changed in 10g with a demo.

Yousef Rifai at DBA-Village Weekly Newsletter hints on set appinfo on option of SQL*Plus to find out what sql script is running in a nested sql script setting.

This week was Tanel Poder‘s week I guess; do you also use sql*plus as a calculator? If it is XE it is also free :) Tanel also showed why does an Oracle parameter count change during session lifetime this week.

Paul Vallee of Pythian Group argues on how to qualify a good backups and provides a paper for the bad habits of a dba.

Christian Bilien is looking after the memory with processes using pmap –x at Where has all my memory gone?

Gints Plivna shows the differences between MINUS-MINUS ALL and INTERSECT-INTERSECT ALL.

Marco Gralike has some reasons for not to use Oracle VM.

Oracle 11g specials of this week came from Tyler Muth on SQL Performance Analyzer and Greg Rahn on Real-Time SQL Monitoring Using DBMS_SQLTUNE.REPORT_SQL_MONITOR. We just got over our 10g Release 2 migrations and started to feel confident with its new features, and now all these articles :)

Oracle ACEs specials starts with Hans Forbrich who has a very busy schedule and wants to have a break on OTN forums for a while, we will miss you Hans take care!

Jonathan Lewis shows the filter plan bug with an example.

John Scott argues his UKOUG 2007 presentation feedback results, I was also there, this was an expected result for me.

Kevin Closson answers on how to choose from the Last of the Non-NUMA Xeon-based Servers.

Patrick Wolf warns that Oracle APEX 3.1 Eval Instance is refreshed.

Nicolas Gasparotto is still on his Peoplesoft Road and we started to miss him at OTN forums :)

Tim Hall is doing 11g new features series, as usual these resources are best of the best, here is the Data Recovery Advisor and RMAN Enhancements. I personally believe that soon Tim Hall and Dan Morgan will beat the documentation :)

Dan Norris shares Interesting Metalink findings and Steven Feuerstein who will be in İstanbul next month for a seminar argues on a functions should return data only through the RETURN clause, of course this is a PL/SQL function :)

MySQL

On MySQL Performance Blog it is announced that the most up to date version of MySql 5.0.54 is now available for CentOS starting with CentOS4.

DbaDojo provides an example and resources on how to setup Multiple MySQL instances on EC2.

Xaprb lists what is new in Maatkit.

Sheeri Cabral of Phytian Group works with SHOW VARIABLES and shows Variables MySQL Does Not Know About :)

Sql Server

On Jeff’s SQL Server Blog an interesting database modeling dilemma is discussed.

On Danny’s SQL Server and Internals Viewer Blog an example on how to get data into XML than to get it back out is showed.

On SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff SQL Server 2008 Spatial Performance of database calls are benchmarked.

On Joseph Sack’s SQL Server Blog an example is given on how SET options impact the Query Optimizer index choice

PostgreSQL